Stop ‘n Go

Commentary

     This is the story of one man, how he lives, how he feels, how he survives a horrific war experience, how he resumes his former life, thereafter.  He’s not an interesting man, not remarkable in any way.  But, like most people, if you look closely, he’s an individual, unlike any other. Written in one long paragraph, two pages long, with a short conclusion at the end, the narration glides from one subject into the next, without transitions, just as the man seems to glide from one phase to another without resistance. The beginning of the paragraph describes an existence of sameness. Every day (except Sunday) he wears the same work clothes, shoes, jacket that he’s worn for years, gets up early to the same routine of chores, drinks instant coffee, and waits for an hour when his wife will appear and fry breakfast, “wordlessly in her housecoat.” Outside, viewing the landscape, he dwells on disappointments. His three children have all left the farm, he doesn’t understand the tricky commercials on television or “what people say,” and he has leased his fields to a northerner.  “Maybe I have outlived time,” he thinks, “Soon there will be no such thing as dew . . . They’ll do away with that, too.” Following these thoughts, he’s suddenly in battle in a French forest during WWII, pretending he’s quail hunting back home, when he’s shot twice.  “He lay there hoping he would freeze to death before he bled out because he had heard a frozen man just fell finally asleep.” But an “old boy” came along and carried him to a safer part of the woods and tended to his wounds.  That night, the boy combined their two sleeping bags and took off all his clothes so his naked body would produce heat while they slept. The man recalled his wife’s body and, at one point, he felt the “roughness of the boy’s cheek when in the night it grazed the back of his neck.” The sensation stayed with him for years to come, but “It felt like a sin.” And then, next sentence, “After he spent six weeks recuperating in England,” the man was sent back to active duty and then on to Dachau to supervise the “cleaning up” of the camps. Reviewing the nightmarish experiences he’d been through, “What got to him” was the Gypsies, gathered outside, homeless, hungry, “sitting around a fire, dirty, skinny as saplings.” 

Here, the second paragraph, the conclusion begins. The man has lived his life tediously at home, recognizes his oncoming age, survived a life-threatening wound in the war, participated in the horror of human tragedy.  At home now, he gets into his truck and, heading down the hill to the Stop ‘n Go, he boldly proceeds “slow as a combine . . . with spite for the traffic, bottling up behind . . . all in a hurry. . . he doesn’t know where or care.”  Brooding earlier about his losses, he now acts with spite and resentment toward those who are “eager” to get to somewhere, someplace “they needed to be.”  Was it his experience in war that finally released his anger? Was it the uselessness of age?   Was it having spent a lifetime of monotony?  All of those?  Whatever the origin, it’s the poignancy of his revenge that touched me–the almost childishness of his response, moving down the ½ mile hill at a stop-and-go pace to get back at the drivers for the suffering he’s endured.  We see now a more complete picture of the man: compliant, reflective, dutiful, sensual, gentle, impulsive, and capable of justified anger.